love and
tears
by Douglas Messerli
Jacques Offenbach (music), Jules
Barbier (libretto, based on his and Michel Carré’s play, based on tales by E.
T. A. Hoffman), Le contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann) /
1881; the production I saw was the Metropolitan Opera’s HD Broadcast of January
31, 2015
Jacques Offenbach’s operatic
repertory favorite, Le contes d’Hoffmann is a true mish-mash of musical and
theatrical offerings: comic opera numbers such as "Il était une fois à la
cour d'Eisenach” (a number that might have been at home in the Broadway musical
Cabaret, replacing that musical’s number “Messkite”); drinking songs in the
manner of Verdi and Wagner; comic novelty numbers such as Olympia’s “Les
oiseaux dans la charmille” and the servant Frantz’s insistence on his singing,
dancing talent, “Jour et nuit je me mets en quatre”; all mixed up with stunning
operatic arias of love and longing such as "C’est un chanson
d’amour."
Divided into three distinct "tales," Offenbach’s work
functions as a baggy monster, with the vague and often fragile interconnective
link insisting that the stories all represent the poet’s failed loves; yet
productions have, at times, lopped off an act or, at other times, added
another. The opera, moreover, sometimes effortlessly, at other times rather
clumsily, shifts between realism, fantasy, and literary autobiography while
delving into the grotesque. Particularly, under Bartlett Sher’s Metropolitan
Opera direction, the work seems nearly always teetering on the edge of a
Kafka-like nightmare tinged with a Berlin-cabaret sexuality that borders also
on camp (Sher insists his sources were Austrian, but they seem much closer, to
my way of thinking, to the Berlin of the 1920s.).
For all this, nonetheless, the Le contes d’Hoffmann survives, perhaps
simply because it does encompass so much that other operas of the day might
have thrown overboard. Whether conceiving as woman as an innocent, an artiste,
or as a courtesan, what Offenbach’s Hoffmann reveals, in the end, is that no
fulfilling liaison can be consummated as long as the writer-artist is wed to
his art. Time and again Hoffmann loses his mind, at no time more evident than
when he puts on Coppélius’ rose-colored glasses to become enchanted with the
wind-up doll Olympia (not so very different, indeed, from Lubitsch’s “doll”
described in the essay above—except that in Hoffmann’s fiction, she has no
human equivalent, despite the fact that the real human Erin Morley brilliantly
imitates her robotic actions.
Hoffmann (the charming and energetic Vittorio Grigolo) falls in love
with a fellow artist, the singer Antonia (Hibla Gerzmava), only to discover
that her very profession may result in her death. Like a would-be controlling
fiancée (today we would describe him as unliberated sexist), Hoffmann is forced
to demand, as has her father, Crespel (David Pittsinger), that she give up her
career, a choice that can only leave her in such frustration that she is almost
immediately tempted to challenge the men in her life by channeling the voice of
her mother, a former primma dona inflicted with the same illness. Antonia can
no more give up her role as an artist than can Hoffmann.
And finally, after nearly giving up on love, the writer seeks love in
the arms of a wicked courtesan, Giulietta (Christine Rice) only to lose his
reflection and, almost, his soul. Hoffmann’s absurd love does end in the death
of Giulietta’s equally lied-to boyfriend, Schlémil (David Crawford). And even
though, in killing her lover, he obtains the key to her boudoir, he is saved by
the fact that she literally leaves him in the lurch, gondolaing off without
him. As the police arrive, he is, once more, saved by the only one who truly
loves him—and whom he, unknowingly, truly loves, his male friend Niklausse,
secretly his "female" muse. If the device of the male friend/female
muse offers a slightly homoerotic tinge to the opera, in the end it truly
doesn’t matter since the muse, obviously, is an aspect of his own being, just
as the three women with whom he falls in love are all elements of the one woman
imagines as his divine partner, the Mozart diva, Stella, who literally ignores
him, and whom he, in his drunken state, no longer even recognizes. Ultimately,
the opera suggests that true artists can only find satisfaction in
themselves—along with copious amounts of beer and wine! But, of course, it very does matter, since these figures represent various gender opportunities to the suffering artist.
Interestingly, Sher has skewered his production away from the simplistic
Hoffmann, who, despite his fascinating tales, remains a vague actor in the
stories of his own life. For Sher, the writer E.T.A. Hoffmann is merely a
stand-in for Offenbach himself. And, from this perspective, the opera does
indeed reveal a great deal about the situation of the actual artist, a German
Jew, well loved by French society, but obviously made to also feel always as an
outsider. The several Jewish references (at times almost anti-Semitic,
particularly in the legend of Kleinzach) signify the kind of dual reality which
the composer faced, wherein at one moment he laughs with his audience as he
tells the story, but by work’s end tragically becomes the mocked figure himself,
taking on the tallit almost as a protective garment against the taunts of his
failures in love and life.
It also helps to clarify the inexplicable evil of the four-headed
villain of the piece, who appears as Lindorf, Coppélius, Dr. Miracle, and
Daspertutto (all played by the noted baritone Thomas Hampson). Why, we ask are
these villains, so similar in some respects, all out to steal, murder, and
abuse Hoffmann’s would-be loved ones. There is no explanation of course for
such evil, such seemingly in-bred hate—except perhaps for the successful
insider’s detestation of all who represent something different and new to his
culture. Such hate clearly leads what Nicklausse / the Muse observes as a
"loss of love and tears," but it will never be able to entirely
destroy true art.
Los Angeles, February 1, 2015
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and
Performance (February 2015).
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